skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, if you're going to put up a Pop-Up touting your app, it had better be a heck of a lot better than letting me browse your news site and not just all about your having an app. What that sort of thing tells me is that you're not about your customer first.

And the same goes if you're going to have a "mobile" version of your site for my iPad: it had better be darned good and not a crippled, controlled experience.
Developing an algorithm doesn't generally cost hundreds of millions. Developing a drug and taking it all the way through clinical trials easily can. I think patents make sense for some sectors. Software just isn't one of them.
I think that last sentence in your comment summarizes it best. They are now, basically, just paying for "shipping" their cargo into space. That is awesome.
[Blog/Pipe dreams] Virtualized brian
if facebook is using the oembed it may be the shared date.

instagrams oembed endpoint doesn't contain created_time data like the media endpoints (and i never understood why not)
I understand it to generally be simply not possible. Any product is going to be infringing on dozens of patents held by any of the big companies in the field.
I actually made it a point not to focus on the brief and rare aspects. Exceptional events that make headlines are, by their nature, exceptional and often glossing over a lot of the necessary and boring foundation that makes it possible.

My chief advice for playing is to find a good group of people with whom to try to achieve something specific and ambitious. You're probably not going to make any headlines, but you're a lot more likely to have fun despite the grind.
The purpose of hellbanning is to prevent people from ruining the site. How exactly josephcooney was ruining HN by posting "The question didn't seem rude to me at all, either. Why is plain communication so often taken as cynicism/sarcasm?" is a mystery to me.
I think the problem is that software / algorithm patents have broader implications and abuses than patents for chemical formulas. They are also being granted for topics that many would consider obvious to those active in the field. The issue isn't protecting valid and specific invention from copying, it's the ease with which software / algorithm patents can be used to sue / bully others with legitimate (not copied) creative inventions. I think the ephemeral nature of software makes it inevitable that a patent eventually gets approved by an examiner if resubmitted enough times. A bogus chemical patent is probably easier to prove bogus.
Thanks for the info thats really helpful ;-)
The original poster, jpxxx, was clearly referring to a physical box. His words were "single server blade".
I think cost is just part of it.

There is also the fact that for lots of things, software are being part of an ecosystem where people come to the same solutions naturally.

Think about the "swipe to unlock", when the only thing you have to interact is a touch screen, it's not like there is lots of different possibilities.

At that point patents become harmfull because it blocks other people from making progress and having competition in a given ecosystem.

Drugs just don't have the same collision of solutions problem.
Huawei and ZTE pose security threat, warns US panel
Acquiring a Property – Putting Your Customer’s Needs on Top Priority
It strikes me that there's an extreme lack of accountability back towards the patent office. In this article you have patent examiners saying "sure we get it wrong all the time", with no real recognition of the disastrous real world consequences of that for the companies who then later become victims of patent litigation (or even conversely, companies who went ahead and invested their future based on their patents being valid and now when it is overturned, have their business destroyed by competitors).

Imagine if, when a patent is overturned as part of a patent infringement case, the defendant could claim all costs and damages they had suffered due to the faulty patent from the patent office? How fast would the system change?
Yes, we will have it on github in a few days!
I wouldn't blame any legislator for thinking that the issue of software patents wasn't a real problem if the debates about were constantly lost to discussing its implications for drugs.

Software patents are a problem, specifically my problem because I'm in that field.
The section titled "Pre-built font binaries" in the README links to the download location, but it's also the standard download location on github (right-hand side, below the clone URL and above the last commit box): https://github.com/adobe/Source-Code-Pro/downloads
The consultant card was a nice one to play. He should have stuck with that. Divulging information of an operation to a target... that shows real bitterness and someone that is not thinking big picture. I was waiting for him to just disappear at that point and the article would ends with 'no-one knows where he is'.

I'm guessing we can read it all about it in a book in a year or 2.
I can't see how it's justified, his comment history isn't so bad: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=josephcooney

A hellban should be a last resort - it's rather a cruel punishment.
While Rasmussen seems biased in the strict technical sense, it's otherwise relatively low-variance high-quality data, so the bias can be corrected for, leaving you with useful information.
Guys... he died in August...
yep. advertisement. title says it's about about app development, but it's a link bait for cloud testing.

if I wanted to read about testing, i'd click on a title that said testing.

was hoping for something that would ease all the pain i have supporting 2.3 AND 4.1... i actually READ the docs and hence i already know what works and what does not. i don't have to write code and pay 'cloud testing' firm to tell me some feature i'm using is not supported on some version.
Could you give an example or two of program code where a proportional font made the punctuation hard to read or stand out less? I'm curious because I've coded in proportional fonts for ten years and haven't found that to be the case myself - with a couple of possible exceptions.

One is names_with_underscores. In a monospaced font, the underscore is the same width as every other character. In a proportional font, the underscore is one of the widest of characters, and much wider than a space.

For example, in the font I'm coding in right now, an underscore is 13 pixels wide, a parenthesis is 8 pixels, and a space is only 5 pixels!

So what happens is that the underscore in a way gives more visual separation in an expression than spaces or other punctuation.

var foo_bar = some_function(one_param, another_param);

To some degree, my eyes group that code this way:

var foo
bar = some
function(one
param, another
param);

My solution for this is simple: don't use names_with_underscores (except when language conventions require it, such as in Ruby), and do add spaces inside the parentheses:

var fooBar = someFunction( oneParam, anotherParam );

Why do the spaces go inside the parentheses and not outside? Well, you need a space in there somewhere, and this just doesn't work for me:

var fooBar = someFunction (oneParam, anotherParam);

Nor this (with no space at all):

var fooBar = someFunction(oneParam, anotherParam);

To me, the space belongs at the same place where I might put a line break if I had a too-long line. I would never break lines like this:

var fooBar = someFunction
(oneParam,
anotherParam);

or like this:

var fooBar = someFunction(oneParam,
anotherParam);

But I do break lines like this:

var fooBar = someFunction(
oneParam,
anotherParam
);

This way the spacing goes in the same place regardless of whether it's a space or a linebreak.
OP stands for original poster.
The current dance around the broken patent system look something like this :

- When you are small, nobody will come to get you because you are not interesting enough for troll of big compagnies (except maybe other direct competitor but it's unlikely)

- Then you become bigger and you will have to deal with licenses from other compagnies and trolls.

- At that point you become defensive, and start to patent things yourself.

- Then you are unwilling to fight against patents because it starts to be an asset for you. And you might even be tempted to go to the dark side and use them to attack other companies at this point.

The good news in all that is that when you are a small company in software, you should not worry too much about patent. I don't remember any startup failing because of that...
Here's a high quality 1080P slow-mo clip of the explosion. You can clearly see huge pieces of debris falling off for several seconds afterwards.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6zsZiVa998&feature=playe...
Zodiac killer
Try not to take offense from things so easily.

I linked Ken's paper because it's related. His conclusion is that it doesn't matter how smart the users or maintainers are if somebody wants to install a clever bug. Smart and clever people can still choose not to accept contributions from people they don't know.
> I think it is easier for the compiler for a high-level language to predict usage patterns

Profile-guided optimizations for C can give a C compiler a lot of the same information. It's true that these patterns could vary over the run of the program, though at that point you have to weigh the speed gained from being adaptive vs. the runtime overhead of monitoring the program's execution and doing multiple passes of code generation.

> For what it's worth: C is my first language, and my favorite language.

Yeah I know. :) A lot of what I wrote was directed more generally at the "faster than C" sentiment and not at you specifically.

> I'm not putting myself on a level with the Lua JIT people

I think you mean the LuaJIT person. I got to finally meet him this summer and verify that he is human, though I guess I can't guarantee that he doesn't have cybernetic implants or work together with others under a single pseudonym. :)
This article briefly touches upon first to file. I think it's clear that the change to first to file will result in the greatest threat to open innovation we have ever seen in our lives.

Think about it -- suddenly you will have swarms of lawyers and executives at pharmaceutical companies paying visits to research labs, and you'll have people from large software companies forwarding ideas posted on open source developer mailing lists to their legal departments. It won't be safe to suggest ideas openly anymore. It won't be safe to talk about "what if" or "have you considered" or "someone should really." We are going to see a flood of really bad patents based on other people's ideas -- and that's exactly what our lawmakers have provided to their friends in large businesses.

Things are about to get a lot worse. But you know, maybe that's what it's going to take -- maybe we have to suffer economically, suffer culturally, before we as a society realize we are building ourselves an intellectual prison for which there is no justification.

Yes, I know that patents are a temporary thing, only lasting 18 years or so; but really, do you think people such as the guy cited in this article are going to say to themselves, "oh, you know, maybe I'll just return to coming up with innovative stuff in the voice recognition field in 18 years, after Nuance can't come after me anymore" -- do you really think that will happen? No, of course not. We're going to see a lot of brilliant people forced to abandon brilliant projects and ideas, and we'll never know what might have been, what could have been done.

I don't think anyone is fighting this in a particularly constructive way -- the whole "abolish all patents" camp is going to get about as much of a serious audience as the "abolish the Fed" and "abolish the labor union" camps -- and perhaps that is exactly what our large-scale adversaries want. We need to be more incremental, more nuanced; that's what they've done, and that's why they are getting everything they want. You think sneaking first to file was something that happened over a chain of emails somewhere? No -- if anything, I bet there is a protracted, multi-decade fight among a lot of very persistent corporate attorneys and executives that has lead to this "win."

In any case, I really hope people in our industry can stop the useless arguments of "end all patents!" for long enough to realize they should be rallying together to fight this simple yet very destructive change that is right over the horizon. You sure as hell won't hear/read my thoughts on future technologies once this first to file thing goes into effect; and I am sure that savvy legal counsels everywhere will be telling their star engineers and employees to remain similarly silent. This is not going to be fun.
Duplicate with discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4621560
Payment Processing: How does Apple do payments so well?
Thanks for the link! This is just what I needed.

Being a CS graduate myself, I can say that your concerns about being detached from knowledge required for day-to-day enterprise is something I can totally relate to. I clearly remember that a LOT of my classmates had paid for a separate set of a classes focused around teaching more practical and hands-on networking stuff. Certainly there's a gap here and it would be great if Coursera comes out with some course which addresses this.
Indeed, but I only came across the obituary today; there seemed to be little discussion on HN at the time, and the retrothing writeup added some background to the story that I didn't see in the other obits.
If you take apart the word "message" into its actual meaning, "left some words somewhere that 1 billion people could go read sometime" then it is not particularly astounding. It's not as if it was whispered into their ears.
Applied Robot Design (for non-roboticists) Stanford Video Lectures
I think you should review definition of "low-level programming language" and learn about assembly languages that support structured programming.
At the level of economic theory, patents are a solution to the free rider problem. They're based on the idea that it doesn't pay to invest in an invention if the fruits of that investment can be easily and cheaply copied by competitors, who can undercut the innovator because they don't have to recoup the investment.

The difference between certain software patents and chemical formulas is the level of investment required to develop the technology. If the level of investment is low, the free rider problem isn't nearly as relevant. If an invention is cheap, the cost can quickly be recouped just by being the first mover. This is especially true in the online space, where there are major network effects favoring the first mover.

Drug design is a completely different bag of cats. The initial investments are huge, in the hundreds of millions of dollars. There are no network effects and being the first mover brings almost no advantage. Drug manufacturers can't compete on quality, they can't compete on anything other than the chemical formula itself and branding (and branding is the result of a different IP regime).
Do you have a link to the printing press one?

Edit: I think I found it: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/355732839/save-a-piece-o...

I was interested cause my wife does a lot with printing presses and we have a C&P platen press.
They weren't. Computers and Internet became a commodity so the market was overcrowded and overhyped. Once the realization happened, the market plummeted and tons of investment and effort went down the drain.

People went batshit insane over the internet in a few years, invested tons and tons and it all collapsed.
That sounds like a Disney movie.

Seriously though, that would never happen and we all know why. The question is: what can be done about it?

Honestly, what can we/I/you do?
I really hope people in our industry can stop the useless arguments of "end all patents!"

Actually, it's failing to stand for a principle that leads to this constant slide downward.

Sure, fight this particular battle, but as you're doing so, don't forget about the war.
I have many cherished memories of playing with the 555 timer. It was what drove me to learn how to hack PICs, and then the Arduino. After that came the mini2440, and the fun never really stopped. I built the siren described by a fellow hacker below, annoying my then girlfriend (and now wife) to no end with it. Then I built some fun strobe lights with LEDs. All for a couple of bucks, and available at the local Radio Shack. I still have a couple of them laying around, and some PIC 16F84 too. Fun times.

RIP fellow hacker.
Ambiguous. Did you mean to compare the two comparisons, or the four people (that is, are you saying Jobs == Tesla?)
They can't be reconciled: patents bind another human down from thinking and acting and trading with his fellow human beings. There's no way to justify that; it's blatantly immoral.
First-to-file does not eliminate prior art.
Single page link, for convenience:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/patent-wars-amo...
Well I don't really understand why everyone jumped on the 'app bandwagon' and spent millions if not billions of dollars developing said apps.

If I could have a regular mobile reading experience using my browser, pray tell why I would want to switch to your awesome app (TM) ? I detest "download our app" popups with a passion. The worst part is that most of these 'apps' just have the same experience packaged into them but are located under yet another icon on my iPhone/iPad. It just doesn't make any sense.

The only other place that I read besides the browser is Pocket.

With responsive design and HTML5 (Geolocation, Canvas, etc.) there really isn't that much more that an app can do - that a browser cannot.

Also, asking to me repeatedly download your app (tripadvisor, you're guilty!) is probably going to alienate me even more from it.

A good example of an app doing less than the website: Until recently I couldn't use the hotels.com app to score/redeem welcome rewards. Yet, when I would go to the site I would either be:

a) Limited to the mobile site

b) Treated to a heinous app download popup.

Way to go!
This is in my opinion the biggest problem with the patent system. The bars for obviousness and novelty are too low if startups need to start worrying about whether they're accidentally coming up with the same designs as existing companies. Provable independent invention needs to be a defense to patent infringement.
I don't know why he was hellbanned; I was just explaining the purpose of hellbanning. FWIW after skimming through josephcooney's history, I am also mystified as to why it happened.
> Or do you think ticking through arrays of hopefully-ASCII bytes, byte by byte, waiting for the 0 byte, is the fastest way to compare two strings?

I'm sure you must know this, but this is not even remotely how strcmp() is implemented in modern libc's.
+1 because I agree. Though, how many more battles must we win?

Maybe it's this lightspeed cultural advancement that makes it all seem so drawn out, but it sure feels like nothing is or has changed for the long term better.
How large does the heap need to be for the garbage collector to work effectively? Could this theoretically run on something like the TI Stellaris LaunchPad, which is an ARM chip with 256KB of Flash and 32KB of RAM?
Don't be so dramatic. By and large what patents prevent is copying: taking someone's ideas and passing them off as your own. Most people consider this immoral too. Restrictions on unfair competition are literally hundreds of years old--it's not a recent invention.

E.g. one of Samsung's biggest problems in the recent patent dispute with Apple was that they were clearly blatantly copying Apple's designs.
"The suit had cost $3 million, and the financial damage was done."

This is the problem. In all other countries (except Great Britain, AFAIK) the loser pays all costs (including the public cost of the trial and the opposing party's legal fees).

The loser-pays system has three effects:

1. No frivolous lawsuits. Cost of losing is high.

2. The defending party will defend vigorously if it believes itself to be in the right.

3. It is relatively cheap to get legal insurance (almost everybody in Germany has it)

Overall this reduces lawsuits in general, stops or reduces the power of threatening legal action, and it stops or reduces the practice of throwing the equivalent of legal sh*t at the wall to see what sticks.

Edit: Spelling
If this is in fact accurate (that Apple & Google R&D spend is less than their Patent spend), it's an incredible waste of time, money and talent:

"In the smartphone industry alone, according to a Stanford University analysis, as much as $20 billion was spent on patent litigation and patent purchases in the last two years — an amount equal to eight Mars rover missions. Last year, for the first time, spending by Apple and Google on patent lawsuits and unusually big-dollar patent purchases exceeded spending on research and development of new products, according to public filings."
If an engineer at Bank of America said something to this tune, it'd have tremendous negative consequence as it should. Facebook is reaching a point where breaking things should not be okay simply because it opens up the possibility of breaking privacy settings and causing great damage.

Lots of people have pretty sensitive data within facebook with very granular privacy settings. When I read this attitude from facebook, it scares the shit out of me.

I'd love to hear more about why I shouldn't fear that their "Show this post to only x group of people" feature will break and result in everyone being able to see all my posts. What are your testing procedures for that and at what point are those kind of bugs caught?
A patent on a molecular structure is a very specific and easily interpreted patent. Most software patents are extremely vague and open to overly broad interpretations. The potential for abuse is far, far greater.
if you put your life on social media without understanding the consequences, that is your own fault. i agree the average person doesnt understand the implications, but it is out of laziness that they do not (it's really not that complicated).

(if facebook changes their settings, that is one, thing, but if you are too lazy to look at what settings exist, that is not facebook's problem)

i totally agree that social media and facebook has become much more than pictures and text - it has a created a generation of people who want to take a picture every 5 minutes no matter how insignificant the event and upload them to "look cool". it has also created a generation of people that pour their heart and emotions out onto facebook to try to gain attention, likes, etc.

if that type of behavior comes back to bite them in the ass, im not sure it is possible to feel sorry for them though....
Yea that pesky tablet revolution wasn't a thing either, and neither was the GUI actually. I'm still using lynx.

(No offense to lynx users.)

Snark aside, it seems like high dpi will inevitably become standard in the next few years.
I was too poor for a C64 and we had a party line :(
thankies ;)
OK, I stand corrected. I thought the continental drift was a more literal and less poetic theory. That's what I get for nit-picking.
News is a particularly good fit for a mobile browser. Structured text + images is actually much easier to render with HTML than with native APIs and the limited interactivity most of these apps require can be added easily enough with JS.

The whole HTML vs native thing is another one of those false dichotomies we waste so much time debating. They both have their place and neither of them are going anywhere.
Yes, if only more people knew "their place".
Google Consumer Survey
Not if you "like" ironically.
A game you can usually walk away from without experiencing life altering change.

These social giants have mountains of information about millions (billions?) of people on this planet, and a legal right to keep it and do pretty much whatever they want with it.

This "game" will never end. Your save data will never be erased. You will likely be reminded of that for years to come.